Your Guide to Consistent Marketing Activity

As we approach Episode 100 of Blackboard Fridays, my weekly video series for mid-tier business owner, I’m increasingly asked about how to create consistent marketing activity.

Consistent Marketing Activity

The first and most important rule is that marketing activity won’t just happen. It’s rarely (if ever) going to be Urgent, which means if you don’t consciously choose to prioritise it then it just won’t happen.

So put aside a regular and specific amount of time dedicated to this nurturing marketing activity. For example, this might be half a day a month … which is just 2.5% of your time. It’s interesting that most people think “2.5% of my time is easy” and yet “half a day each month is impossible”.

Once you have the consistent time, here are my ‘rules’ for using it wisely.

Some people and businesses are content creating machines, but don’t think this comes naturally or automatically. Take Blackboard Fridays as an example – weekly, amazing video content … created by someone who trained as a journalist, hosted a TV show, and has a marketing team supporting him. It wasn’t an overnight creation.

Your 10th video/podcast/blog post will be 100x better than your 1st one BUT you can only create the 10th one if you’ve already created numbers 1 through 9. So make #1 happen (or 2 or 3 or whatever).

The context is consistency. Consistently producing something is faaaaar more important and valuable than only producing things of quality. In part, because quality comes from consistency.

So this is where the 2.5% time comes from. If you can, and I prefer to, make it a full day where you do nothing else – still only 5% of your time each month. You may prefer 2 hours each week, or a fortnightly routine. You may prefer mornings over evenings, or vice-versa. There are never any emails that can’t wait a day. Never.

Then, choose what you’re going to create. Blog posts? Videos? Podcasts / Audio? Interpretive Dance? You might flirt with variations, but in a context of consistency you need to pick the main one.

Now, target a length. Good blog posts are 600-800 words. Great blog posts are 2000 words +. INCREDIBLE blog posts are under 150 words. Most marketing videos target 3 minutes – Blackboard Fridays aren’t that good, so they go longer – but you have about 3 seconds to grab their attention. (Podcast length? Sorry, I’m too old to understand podcasts.)

Having selected that, what’s the routine that best supports you to create that? Quiet café? Lots of black coffee? No shoes on? You learn this through trial and error, and trial and error is another name for … consistency!

You have no shortage of ideas (although, if you do, I’ll be writing about that next month). It’s just consciously creating the time to ‘put them into reality’. So pick one topic. Doesn’t have to be the best one. Doesn’t matter – you’re doing this again next month anyway. Which one do you most want to write/talk about today? Then do it.

Ideally create several pieces of content in a sitting. Our last Blackboard Fridays shoot put 17 videos in the can. Obviously we don’t release it all at once.

I got to #1 on Google in part because I’ve pumped out at least 1 blog post every month since this website launched in January 2014. In 2008, my coaching team won more clients than any other in the Oz business, in part because we did a newsletter every Friday morning. And obviously I’m now doing that in video format, and when people say “Oh, you shoot some videos” I can say “Yeah, we just released episode 94”.

All started with that first one, and getting into a routine to keep them coming. Some are still ordinary – Just. Keep. Producing.

Let’s synthesise:

Pick one format – blog, video, audio, dance

Schedule a consistent production time each month

Release consistently – even if that’s monthly at first. Don’t over-commit, unless that helps you